Published in Roads and Infrastructure Magazine, May 2024: https://roadsonline.com.au/mooven-seeing-more/

Mooven has placed itself as an influencer in the compliance and monitoring space, guiding both infrastructure projects and general road agency duties towards success. Here’s how. 

Why do construction projects often exceed cost and time targets? Financial pressures, skilled personnel and materials shortages and other factors all play their part. But so does a desire to reduce community disruption when paired with a lack of actionable insight on current road conditions or the real traffic impacts          

Mooven, a performance monitoring, program optimisation and community engagement platform, was founded upon this premise. How can we work faster and reduce delays by better aligning construction to the needs of cities?

The company focuses on providing a platform by which both government and public contractors can have more accurate and informative project data, helping to minimise the impacts from unforeseen events, as well as associated complexities around project delivery.

Mooven Co-Founder and CEO, Micah Gabriels, says this fine balance can often topple over, especially in metropolitan areas.

“In a city like Melbourne, there’s a lot of tension you can feel between getting major infrastructure works done efficiently and living in the city at the same time,” he says. “Typically, if there’s concern about traffic impacts, the status quo is to push construction activity outside of busy times.    

“The problem is, the information used to make these decisions is often based on annual traffic assumptions across entire cities. Plus a fear of disruption, the unpredictable nature of cities and often lengthy construction times force a set of rules tailored to worst case scenario. Why should we care about this? Inefficient delivery increases costs and timeframes. Our customers frequently reduce project durations by 50 per cent or more by simply using a rich and accurate understanding of the conditions to tailor their work to the specific location.”

“That’s the really fun part, putting leading data, AI and technology in the hands of delivery teams so they can work smarter each day is a game-changer. And a shift that is disproportionate to other initiatives.”   

Mooven’s technological portfolio can provide a service that enables both government and public contractors to better measure important factors around their worksites. This can lead to opportunities that may not have been previously available, to create important savings in project cost and the time required for completion. Most importantly, creating trust and confidence across parties.

“We’ve been developing this approach, where we can grab data from a wider range of sources to truly understand what is going on, and why,” Gabriels says. “We overlay the data teams use today with connected vehicle data for live traffic, information on public transport routes and broader context like how many businesses are nearby when they’re open and events.”               

“You can get a really rich picture of why the city is busy, as well as [importantly] predict if it’s going to be busy in your location in the future. It’s completely changing the game for people.”

“The true enabler for change though is being able to accurately monitor what is actually happening during delivery. Without this compliance trail, you can’t build trust amongst the wider range of stakeholders involved in these projects.”

Mooven has embraced a no-hardware approach using what’s known as ‘floating vehicle data’ to help customers more quickly, reliably, safely and cost-effectively get the information they need. This has resulted in the replacement of Bluetooth technology as the primary and preferred source of gathering traffic and site condition data.

This approach has also been verified by the Department of Transport and Main Roads in Queensland, which certified that Mooven’s floating vehicle data approach was not susceptible to the same data gaps that have been seen in Bluetooth data.   

Gabriels was quick to point out that hardware still plays a valuable role. 

“We use a wide range of hardware, it’s just about picking the best tool for the job,” he says.  

Mooven software and hardware have been used in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory, New Zealand, and the United States.

Interestingly, Gabriels explains that there is still some resistance to what he explains as a more holistic and ideal solution to the demands being placed on construction staff as a result of Australia’s infrastructure pipeline.

“It’s a really interesting journey.  There’s great intention and widespread belief in the adoption of technology to address the sectors’ challenges and to catch up with other industries. However, this butts heads with inertia and a current system that penalises people from stepping outside of the box –ticketing processes – that most people would say over a beer, do a poor job of achieving the desired outcomes,” he says. 

Mooven Co-Founder and CEO, Micah Gabriels.